The Third Parable

Chapter 58

1 And I began to speak the third Parable concerning the righteous and elect. 2 Blessed are you, righteous and elect, for your destiny shall be glorious. 3 The righteous will be in the light of the sun, and the elect in the light of eternal life; their days shall be endless, and the days of the holy beyond count.⁠ 4 They shall seek the light and find righteousness with the Lord of Spirits; there shall be peace for the righteous in the name of the Eternal Lord.⁠ 5 After this, it shall be said to the holy in heaven that they should seek out the secrets of righteousness, the heritage of faith; for it has become as bright as the sun upon earth, and the darkness has passed. 6 There shall be a light that never ends, and they shall not experience a limit of days, for the darkness will have been destroyed, and the light established before the Lord of Spirits; the light of uprightness established forever before the Lord of Spirits.

Texts in conversation

Compare 1 Enoch 58:3 and Psalms of Solomon 3:12

Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses · Pseudepigrapha, Wisdom and Poetry

Summary

1 Enoch 58 and the Psalms of Solomon 3 both envision a future reward for the righteous of resurrection to unending life and radiant light. Each describes the righteous living in the light of the sun or eternal life, emphasizing eternal peace.

Passages

1 Enoch 58:3

Pseudepigrapha, Apocalypses

300 BCE – 100 CE (scholarly estimate) Read in 1 Enoch

Psalms of Solomon 3:12

Pseudepigrapha, Wisdom and Poetry

9 The sinner stumbles and curses his life, the day he was born, and his mother's labor pains. 10 He adds sin to sin while he lives (?); He falls, his fall is truly terrible, and he never rises again. 11 The destruction of the sinner is forever, and he will not be remembered when God attends to the righteous person. 12 This is the fate of sinners forever. But those who fear the Lord shall rise to eternal life, And their life (shall be) in the light of the Lord, and will never end.

65–30 BCE (scholarly estimate) Read in the Psalms of Solomon

References

"... The only pre-Christian “third day” association appears in the cult of Osiris, but the “third day” was a fairly regular expression for a short period of time (such as “the day after tomorrow”) in Jewish sources, a small enough figure to generate many coincidences. Palestinian Jewish Christians appealed to the “third day” (which merely meant parts of three days) before any Diaspora exposure to the cult of Osiris (the pre-Pauline formula in 1 Corinthians 15:3–4). Bodily resurrection was a common Palestinian Jewish idea. (See e.g. Psalms of Solomon 3:12; 15:12–13; 1 Enoch 22:13; 61:5; 2 Maccabees 7:9, 14, 23, 29; 14:46; 2 Baruch 30:1; 51:1–6; Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 3:10; 25:6–7; Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1) If a newly Gentile church preached a dying-and-rising mystery deity, why would Palestinian Jewish Jesus monotheists adopt this concept and give it the Palestinian Jewish language of “resurrection”? It seems far more likely that Gentiles attracted to a growing Jewish movement would have adapted the Palestinian Jewish resurrection concept ..."

Craig S. Keener, “Jesus and Parallel Jewish and Greco-Roman Figures,” in Christian Origins and Greco-Roman Culture: Social and Literary Contexts for the New Testament, ed. Stanley E. Porter and Andrew W. Pitts, TENTS 9 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 85–111.

References are not endorsements of their contents. Read each reference in full to understand its author's intentions in using these texts.

The Third Parable

1 Enoch108 chapters

Compare 1 Enoch 58:3 and Psalms of Solomon 3:12

Summary

Passages

1 Enoch 58:3

Psalms of Solomon 3:12

References

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